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Since I moved to Norway, foreign friends have come and gone. Students, people with short contracts, people who can’t stand the cold and the rain. People who meet someone and want to try other countries, travellers.

But it is really in the past 2-3 years that I’ve noticed a pattern of people leaving despite a well established life here. Foreigners with good jobs, often with kids in Norwegian schools and kindergarten and a good network around them. They often own a home, wherever they live in Norway, and sometimes they also own a company. They’ve lived here for 6 or 8 or even 15 years.

They leave for good. Not a vacation or a “break” to live somewhere else for 2 years and come back to Norway. They get their kids out of school, resign their jobs and sell everything.

When they managed to buy a place, they leave with quite some cash and can then buy themselves a nice, a very nice place wherever they are moving to. Sometimes they haven’t managed to buy property, and they leave with less money. Moving away comes at a cost, even when moving “home”. It irequires a lot of logistics to move children to a new school, find a new home, find two jobs, reach a balanced economy etc. Yet they risk it all. It means people make an assessment as to where it is best to live, and despite economic problems hitting many of our home countries, they still think it’s worth it.

What is happening? Has Norway become so unliveable for foreigners?

In my 14 years in Norway I have heard all the possible complaints about this country. It is unfriendly, cold, rainy, dark in the winter, the health system is slow, the education system does not expect enough from children, the food is terrible. And the great things. It is a democracy, there is freedom of expression, breathtaking nature, clean water, clean air, subsidised kindergarten and a worklife balance like nowhere else. Strong labour laws. Good wages too. Although that argument has been less and less present in discussions.

Unless you are a refugee, if you come to Norway you are in one of two categories. The first one where you are highly skilled and can find a well payed job in an office for example. The second one where you have to do low skilled jobs. Reasons to have a low skilled job vary. You might be highly skilled with diplomas which aren’t recognise in Norway, or you have a good qualification but don’t speak Norwegian, or you are in competition with Norwegians on the job market. Then you end up delivering food for Wolt, or being in jobs where employers don’t always respect labour laws, let alone pay you a living wage.

Internations published recently its annual report on where so-called “expats” have the best life. I have dug a bit in the methodology they use, and expats in their definition is not someone who is a Westerner, they actually mean immigrants, wherever they come from. However three major weaknesses here: they only need to interview 50 persons in a country for the country to make the survey. In Norway they interviewed 100 immigrants, which is far from being representative of immigrants in this country. Another weakness is that the persons they interview are not representative in proportion of the immigrants present in a country (for ex. there are more Polish people than American people in Norway, and that should be represented in the group interviewed). There is no info in Internations as to where the interviewed people come from. And lastly, they don’t include refugees in their survey. Lastly, only 53 countries make it in the survey, not representative of all countries in the world. One needs to keep in mind Internations is a company trying to have more members in the “expat” community to make money, it is not a research institute.

Knowing this, one can look at the results of the survey with a pinch of salt. In this survey, Norway arrives next to last, with Kuwait being a worse place for foreigners to live. Foreigners who were asked why they don’t like it here answered among other things the unfriendliness of locals, challenges with the health system and lack of access of public transportation. They also mention worklife not being that good.

A more proper study, called EXITNORWAY by OsloMet, looks at why 30,000 foreigners leave Norway each year.

From what I hear, there is undoubtedly a financial aspect to foreigners staying in Norway or not. When we leave our home countries, or another country we’ve been living in, to come to Norway, there has to be a good reason. Some find a Norwegian partner and are lured into living here where “it is so much better to raise children”. Others have job opportunities here. But most of us  come here with no network, no language skills, and no family who can help us with repairing our home, taking care of our kids, lend us their family cabin. First generation immigrants are always at a disadvantage, wherever in the world, so there has to be something else in it for us.

Often that thing that makes us live abroad is money, career, or love. But in the past year, the NOK has been devalued drastically. When I moved here in 2010, 1 Euro was worth just above 6 NOK. On 31st of May this year it hit 12 NOK for 1 EUR.

For those who send money home or who travel to see their family, it is a brutal change. Life has also become much more expensive for everyone in Norway, and the disposable income one is left with it not that substantial. SSB (Statistics Norway) has shown that foreigners earn 18% less than Norwegians in average. With less network, foreigners also have less job opportunities and have more expenses (renting because access to property can takes years, just think of Norwegians having grand parents around while others have to pay baby sitters, paying for every night in a cabin when others have access to free family cabins, no inheritance to buy a home etc.). When single, or living with one wage for a family, the financial situation can become very tight.

The flat structure in Norwegian companies, which is praised by many, also becomes a hindrance. High-skilled workers know they can be paid the same salary or even more in a country where life is cheaper, because the gap between their salary and the lowest paid person is much bigger than in Norway. Their disposable income then increases.

Life has become harder for Norwegians too, and many friends feel that society is more closed than before. When surveys show that even Norwegians are less happy, how can we expect foreigners to be more happy?

My latest friend to leave is French. She called me a couple of weeks ago to break the news. Neither her nor her partner have found a job where they are going, in the French area at the border with Switzerland, but they have family closeby, and prospects of earning 2 or 3 times the salary they get in Norway just by living in France and working in Switzerland. One of the reasons for leaving, among many, is getting help with everyday life with their kids, but also the prospects of buying a place in Oslo or around having disappeared with high interest rates.

If prospects of a comfortable life are so much lower for high skilled workers, this could become a problem for Norwegian companies needing these skills to grow their business. But in the meantime, some of us are still here, holding on to what we love about this country and hoping that the current challenges will pass, and not grow.